I don't know how much they're payin' you to bring me in. It ain't enough. Not nearly enough.

I'd hunt you for free. Let's go.

Much like Gary Cooper - that other prime example of the strong, silent type - Randolph Scott is an actor that I've only come to appreciate over the past several years. Though he started off in standard "handsome leading man" roles in comedies and dramas back in the 1930s, what I like to call the "real" Randolph Scott emerged in the late 1940s and really came to the fore in the 1950s. As he aged, Scott's handsome face became more weathered and craggy, his air of quiet authority and mild Southern gentility more pronounced, and from 1948 on, all his roles but one were on horseback, where he truly belonged. Rather than shirk it, Scott happily embraced his status as a "cowboy" actor. It was a genre which he obviously enjoyed, one in which he excelled, and one that, along with his canny business acumen, made him a rich man for the rest of his long life, long after he retired from acting.Though superstars like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood loom larger in the public imagination of what a western movie hero looks like, it's Randolph Scott who to my mind seems most inextricably linked to the genre - the quintessential screen cowboy. In his unassuming, solid-as-a-rock way, Scott headlined a string of colorful bread-and-butter westerns, modestly-budgeted but well-mounted, the top tier of which hang with the best that the 50s had to offer. And for those that know the way the western genre flourished and dominated that decade, that's no small praise indeed.